Tomorrow will be the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.
I was six years old at the time, and our whole family watched on our B&W console TV (color was another year off yet for us), although I remember my four year old brother didn’t really understand what was going on and seemed terribly bored through most of it. As for me, I was transfixed. Young as I was, I nevertheless understood I was watching an important milestone in human history. There would be only one "first landing on Earth’s moon."
I was a precocious child, and even in 1st Grade my teacher knew of my fascination with America’s space program — and she gave me a gift, a NASA photograph book, documenting the Apollo series of launches. I still have the tattered remnants of that oft-viewed folio-sized book...some of the pictures have been lost over the years, in part because my favorites ended up taped to my bedroom wall. At one point, I also had a huge wall map of the moon, and I marked the various landing sites. I couldn’t wait for the chance one day to put markers on Luna’s far-side half of that map and had colors already picked out to differentiate between the early exploratory landings and the permanent lunar bases.
Reading was my area of personal genius. Once I learned how, I soon had reading comprehension levels years ahead of my chronological age. I devoured science books, and my fiction choices always leaned towards science fiction. For instance, I loved the Heinlein ‘juveniles’ as they’d be called today, and to this day, I can still remember the first time I read "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel."
I grew up on ‘The Outer Limits’ and ‘Star Trek’. If it involved sci-fi — and especially if it included space travel of any kind — I watched it, no matter how badly written or produced. U.F.O., Space 1999, Starlost — I didn’t care. (Yeah, a lot of it was truly dreadful. But then came Star Wars...wow.) I just wanted to believe we would be out there in space, possibly even sending interstellar probes within my lifetime.
In the late 1960s, the speculative fiction of the time flat out assumed we would have launched manned missions to the other planets in our solar system long before now. Star Trek’s original fictional time-line had eugenically engineered ’super-men’ fleeing in sublight interstellar sleeper-ships — in the late 1990s. In "2001: A Space Odyssey," we had huge space stations in orbit, permanent bases on the moon, and built a nuclear-powered manned ship to go to Jupiter (the Discovery). And space was accessible to civilians and tourists. Nearly all the sci-fi authors of the era had us humans out exploring the stars in the early to mid 21st century. Jerry Pournelle’s ‘Future History’ time-line posited the development of a faster-than-light drive in 2004, the first ships leaving Sol in 2008, and the discovery of the first habitable world in 2010. I say again, these were not seen as ridiculous propositions in the late 60s and early 70s, else they never would’ve been published as stories or produced as movies or TV shows.
My point? On July 20, 1969, if you asked anybody how long it would take before we did these things — big permanent space stations, moon bases, landing on Mars — most would have said something like, "Oh, just another ten years... twenty years, tops."
It’s been 40 years.
All we’ve done is muck around in low Earth orbit (LEO). There’s a reason why there are a couple of Saturn-V rockets laying on the ground as rusting museum exhibits: The last three missions were canceled, for the purpose of diverting money to the just initiated Space Shuttle program. (They also scrapped the nuclear rocket engine program.) The original concept for the Shuttle was simply as one component in a revamped, reusable system. Early plans had external fuel tanks lofted into orbit to serve as raw materials in initial crude space station construction. There was to be an automated orbital "Space Tug" to take satellites and probes from the Shuttle cargo bay and carry them to high orbit or boost them to escape velocity. The whole point was to establish not only a permanent presence in orbit, but also to create the means to assemble ships up there. The purpose? The first goal would be Mars. All these projects were canceled, their budgets slashed the point of negating any useful ongoing mission objectives.
As were dozens of other promising programs. Skylab came crashing down because the money to boost it to a higher orbit was denied. Unmanned rockets were defunded, in an effort to force all launches onto the poorly designed "one size fits all" Shuttle. There was to have been a fleet of a dozen or more Shuttles, with launches roughly once a week, and when designed in the early 70s it was assumed we’d have long since replaced them with 2nd or even 3rd generation launch systems by now. (Imagine, if you will, if America’s top-of-the-line fighter jets in 2009 were essentially unchanged from their early 1970s designs, but for upgraded electronics and avionics. And only a small handful of them in existence.)
Then the Challenger exploded and the entire space program went on hold for six years (1986 to 1992). Not many know this, but the reason the Galileo probe to Jupiter could not extend its main transmission antenna is because it sat in storage for all those years, until it could finally be launched. We haven’t built a new manned launch vehicle since 1992, when Endeavor was constructed as a replacement for Challenger (and that mostly out of parts intended as spares for other shuttles). There have been only five shuttles in all, with only three remaining... and the current plans are to retire these before we have the new ‘Constellation’ launch systems up and running — another program already hobbled with inadequate funding and a high likelihood of being budget-cut to the point of non-viability and total pointlessness.
Billions of dollars have been poured into the new ‘International Space Station’, and even before it’s done being constructed, they’re already talking about de-orbiting it in a couple years due to budget shortfalls. It’s as if a huge skyscraper was just built, and before the tenants even finish moving in, they’re already scheduling the demolition crews — because it’s deemed too expensive to maintain the building, or even to finish installing all the features originally designed for it.
Apollo 17 left the moon on December 13, 1972. We haven’t been back. Plans to return have been floated at times, as have various proposals for Mars missions — but it’s never been serious. We’ve never gone beyond the proposals stage. We’ve never had the drive and the funding that saw us go from ballistic sub-orbital rockets to a successful land-and-return trip to our nearest cosmic neighbor in less than ten years.
Now I know there are quite a few people who did and do think it was all a colossal waste of money. One blogger whom I actually respect quite a bit insists that the entire Apollo effort was just a Cold War boondoggle and that there’s really no good purpose to manned space missions of any kind. That we ought to just dump the Shuttles, de-orbit the ISS, and give up forever the idea of sending humans into space. Too expensive. No point. Just nationalistic chest-thumping, throwing money away, and we didn’t need a space program to invent velcro, titanium prosthetics, or computers smaller than a room. (Actually, we didn’t, but aerospace programs did foster and promote a number of technological advancements. Do you have GPS on your iPhone or in your car? Do you use Google Earth to find your way around? Have a satellite dish for your TV? Watch the Weather Channel forecasts? All of these things came directly out of space technologies.)
Again, I go back to the late 1960s. The Cold War kept threatening to get hot. The Middle East looked to be on the verge of a possible nuclear war. America had poured money and lives into the mistake known as the Vietnam Conflict. We knew back then that oil wasn’t limitless and that we were in the process of ruining Earth’s environment through pollution and attrition. We had ample reasons not to try for the moon. The Soviet Union, too.
To have a space program was a paradigm breaking expression of optimism. Sure it was expensive, but it was all about reaching out. The Americans and the Soviets had a ’space race’, yet over time it actually helped defuse the Cold War and contributed towards our mutual rapprochement. It directed our gaze upward, and let all of us, including young kids, look at the planets and stars in the sky and say, "One day, people will live there." And given the speed at which we went from nothing all the way to the moon, many of us just assumed there’d be hundreds, if not thousands of people living off-planet by the year 2000.
Obviously it didn’t happen. What went wrong? A lack of will, determination, and imagination. 40 years later and we’re still burning petroleum and coal — even though we know it’s damaging the environment. Resources are running out, fresh water is disappearing, global warming is a reality deniable only to the most close-minded, and Earth’s human population continues to multiply at an unsustainable rate.
Robert Heinlein also said, "The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for humanity to keep all its eggs in." Under the current short-sighted view, within a few more generations we will have burned up all the oil and coal. The rare chemicals and minerals so integral to our modern technology will be used up. The only sources for metals will be whatever we can manage to recycle from old junk. What will we do then? Give up the high-tech, high-energy, high-consumption culture? In a finite closed system, we’ll never last, not the way we’ve been living and not with our current numbers.
The answer is up there, out there. By the human scale of things, both resources and energy are essentially infinite in space. There are asteroids and moons to be mined. As much solar energy as you can build arrays for sucking it up. Water in icy comets, on Mars and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and quite possibly even at the Lunar poles, deep in shadowy craters. Once out there, we can even protect our own home nursery from harm, diverting ‘extinction level event’ asteroids from collision. Moreover, once we have a truly permanent and numerous presence off the Earth, no single disaster can eliminate the entire human species and those life forms we take with us. And if people want to continue to ‘be fruitful and multiply’, fine — there’s plenty of room. But it only works if we actually do make a serious effort to break free.
If we don’t, we truly cannot continue as we have been. We are fouling our nest. We are using up all the resources. We continue to multiply without restraint, and if we haven’t surpassed Earth’s carrying capacity already, we will eventually. The closed, finite system that is Planet Earth cannot by definition support a species that believes in unlimited, endless growth and consumption. A crash is inevitable. A global die-back and reversion to bronze-age level technology (or lower) is likely. Extinction a distinct possibility. Earth itself could be rendered incapable of supporting life.
But people object. It’s too hard. Space programs cost too much. We need to spend our money and resources taking care of what we have now. That space travel stuff is just too risky. Maybe later, but not now. We need to spend our money on military build-ups, wars of choice, and bailing out financial conglomerates deemed ‘too big to fail.’ Heck, those other things chew up so much money, America cannot even muster $100b a year to ensure basic medical care for all its citizens — how can we expect anything but a token pittance for "unnecessary pork-barrel space programs"?
My point is we’re barely even trying. And what little we do try is timid, unconstant, and marked with an unachievable desire to somehow make it 100% safe before we make the attempt. Centuries ago, explorers launched themselves onto vast hostile oceans, not knowing if they’d find land and safe harbor before their supplies ran out or storms destroyed their ships. Many died, especially in the earliest fragile boats. Enough survived. They thrived and prospered.
Oscar Wilde said, "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking the stars." I would suggest that a great many of us now can see only the gutter, and we’ve forgotten the stars exist.
We’ve forgotten that on July 20th 1969, nearly the entire world believed the Eagle landing on the moon was just the beginning. Again, surely within a few years, we’d have permanent space stations, and we’d go to near-Earth asteroids and Mars soon after. To believe the latter would happen by the early 1980s was not at all unreasonable. Surely, at least that much.
It’s been nearly two generations since that historic day — and the only thing we’ve gotten better at is launching satellites and robotic probes (the two still-functioning Mars rovers are nothing short of astonishing... it’s been years, and they were only expected to work for 90 days max). But the number of humans in orbit at any given time can usually be counted on the fingers of one hand. We have not even visited the moon again. No Mars mission. Only a handful of ultra-wealthy civilians have gone into orbit briefly, all of them as passengers of the cash-strapped Russian space program. (Another fact: NASA administrators fought vehemently against allowing this, but gave in only when the Russians said they’d stop launching the cargo ships necessary to keep the ISS running.)
You see, when I was six years old and watching Neil Armstrong plant his boot and mangle his historic line, like many I just flat out assumed it would be both possible and commonplace for ordinary people to vacation off-planet. Honeymoons in orbital hotels and all that. Sure, it’d probably be expensive, more than a high-end luxury ocean cruise, but it would be within the range of an ordinary person who saved up for the once-in-a-lifetime experience. And I promised myself I would do this, just leave Earth once before I died, even if only into low orbit. I was far from the only person who believed this would be possible within a single generation.
I guess we all underestimated just how many people would rather stare at the gutter, and to believe the stars would forever be unattainable. Just pretty lights in the sky, more important for their presumed astrological effects than as destinations we would dare to explore one day.
I still have hope that one day a new generation will grow up without such binding fetters and lack of imagination. One day, we humans will reach out, collect what we need, and build a great many more nests...and most of all, to explore and see what is really out there. We can do it. If only we want to badly enough.
One day, I hope the history books read, "There was a long gap in serious manned space exploration after the extraordinary American lunar landing in 1969, with missions hampered by a lack of political will and budgetary commitment. In the first half of the 21st century however, several visionary nations banded together, joined by the realization that by investing what they had, the future payoffs would guarantee virtually unlimited economic growth and technological development. The first nation-consortium to build Earth’s first orbital space tether was the foundation for humanity’s early interplanetary expansion and eventual interstellar federation..."
Dr Martin Luther King had his dream. I have mine.
(On update: It would seem that the Apollo 11 astronauts, two of them anyway, have had a similar idea:
Two of the astronauts who took part in the first Moon landing 40 years ago have called for renewed efforts to send a manned mission to Mars. At a rare public reunion of the Apollo 11 crew, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins said Mars instead of the Moon should be the focus of exploration.
Neil Armstrong, the first man on the Moon, said the race to get to the Moon had been the ultimate peaceful contest. He said it was an "exceptional national investment" for the US and ex-USSR.
(H)e also pushed for a mission to Mars: "The best way to honour and remember all those who were part of the Apollo programme is to follow in our footsteps; to boldly go again on a new mission of exploration."
He urged further exploration, saying: "I worry that the current emphasis on returning to the Moon will cause us to become ensnared in a technological briar patch needlessly delaying for decades the exploration of Mars - a much more worthwhile destination."
src: Apollo 11 Astronauts Speak